There’s a reason there’s no one prescribed recipe for a successful SEO audit. It’s the same reason SEO “best practices” are so often inconsistent. It changes its algorithm almost daily, and it rarely tells us why or how it did so. You can then export pages with little to no content and identify page-level action items on how to fix each one. Speaking of content…your pages aren’t going to get any respect in the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) if they’re thin. Panda, a 2011 Google algorithm update that cracked down on sites with thin content, made sure of that.

For example, you can pull keyword rankings and backlink data from Semrush. Then combine it with Google Search Console data to highlight clicks and impressions. “We wanted to democratize the depth and quality of professional SEO audits, typically costing over £1,000, by making them accessible to every business, absolutely free.” A sitemap.xml is essentially a list of all pages on your website that you want search engines to discover, crawl and index. It also lives on the root folder in most cases and can be found at domain.com/sitemap.xml. Keywords are essential to SEO, since they are what users search for when they are researching.

How often should you get an SEO audit?

SEO audit tools are suites of tools that identify technical, UX, and content issues on your site. The best tools tell you where you’re at and offer actionable strategies for improving. So when I audit a customer’s site (or mine), I tend to take a pretty fine-toothed comb to all of these.

The audit report may also include specific actions that you can take to improve your site’s performance and increase its visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs). Getting your website to rank in Google is harder and more competitive than ever. There are many factors such as on page content, performance, social factors and backlink profile that search engines like Google use to determine which sites should rank highest. Reviewing every element of your website can have a massive impact on its performance. For example, your audit can result in a faster, better-optimized website.

Use Google Search Console to monitor your CTR and check for indexing issues in the Coverage Report. Monitor loading speed, interactivity, and layout stability in tools like PageSpeed Insights. Core Web Vitals are a priority when analyzing page performance, but there are other areas to check to ensure your site delivers a fast and responsive experience.

Advanced Content Analytics

An awesome set of SEO tools can make or break the success of your audit and drastically decrease the time it takes. Considering the reasons to do an SEO audit, it is critical to know that almost any time is the perfect time to do an SEO audit. The bottleneck is simply the reward based on the time it will take to complete. Mostly, we would recommend doing a complete SEO audit at least once a quarter. But this can be more often or less often based on the size of your website and the amount of content that is published monthly.

Remember; accessibility refers to crawlers being able to access your pages while indexability refers to those pages being presented within the search engine after being accessed. However, this means that crawlers are now unable to access that page. In order to allow access, you need to create a SEO Anomaly redirect leading them to moved page. Bear in mind that your XML sitemap needs to be properly formatted and submitted to webmaster tools account so that it can be accessed. First thing that you have to check is your robots.txt file and robots meta tags. These two are important as they restrict access to certain areas of your website.

Difficulty shows us how hard or easy is to rank while traffic shows us how many people search for that term during one month. Being trustworthy is not only good for the search engine; it is important for your overall reputation. It means that a website is trusted by the Google search engine. In other words, if you are steering clear from all the negative SEO practices (so called, black hat SEO) you will gain more trust. Basically, everything that has been done in first two steps (during technical and on-page analysis) is performed so that your website would be better and more visible to Google. It needs to be nice, clean, to describe content properly and briefly.

• Then move to enhancements and optimizations that can boost performance.
• Certain schema types, like rich results markup, allow your listings to display extra details, such as star ratings, event information, or product prices.
• Fortunately, at WebFX, we have a suite of services enabling off-page analysis and comparison.
• Once you’ve found these areas, adjust your CTAs, page design, or content to reduce friction.

Check Language Versions to see what language versions your website has. Additionally, review Pages with hreflang elements to get a list of URLs with those elements. If any of your pages have issues, check the platform recommendations and take relevant measures. Check the Mobile Friendliness and Page Speed section to identify actionable suggestions for optimizing performance. If you’re interested in exploring Core Web Vitals of a single page, navigate to the Page Audit section and access the Technical Audit tab.